Tamika Y. Nunley. At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, DC.

Abstract

In this paradigm-shifting and award-winning work, Nunley excavates Black women’s struggles for freedom, imagined lives, and processes of making and remaking liberty in antebellum Washington, DC. By not limiting their words and actions to resistance, the author contends that “self-definition” and “navigation” were “critical processes and strategies that black women employed in their quest for liberty” (3). Through actions and words, Black women expanded notions of republicanism, liberty, and citizenship for self and nation. In the opening chapters, Nunley deftly locates enslaved Black women and the centrality of their labor in the nation’s capital. Whether in the slave market or the homes of political elites, she shows how Black women exploited the contradiction of slavery and the centrality of their labor to the District of Columbia’s economy for their own resistance, liberation, and struggles in the courts. In the process, Black women transformed the city and surrounding counties into “a contested site of liberty” (39). Relying on “shards of information,” Nunley transforms escape notices into “narratives of enslavement” and persuasively presents a “record of women’s self-making” over shifting geographies of escape and anti-slavery activist networks (41, 48).